Ted talks like an ideologue but his office was among the last to comply with minimum wage when Newt's conservative congress forced him to do it. I will cede you the drunken part.
As for Joe, I don't think that he's stupid. Sometimes very smart people make decisions that they think will work out but they don't. The other thing is that sometimes we do things a particular way even though we may have the best of intentions (work with me here :-) ) and we are so committed to the overall goal that it's hard to see that the efforts are counterproductive.